This invention generally relates to telecommunication systems and particularly is concerned with the provision of an improvement to existing call holding arrangements for telephone line circuits.
Telephone communication systems have markedly increased in complexity and sophistication over the years, such systems providing a wide variety of customer services. Among the most common equipment in use today is so-called multi-line key equipment which includes telephones having a plurality of push-buttons or keys enabling the selection and manipulation of a plurality of different phone lines and further enabling any particular call to be placed in so-called "hold."
This "holding" capability of the modern multi-line telephone, while providing a considerable convenience to its user enabling the user to switch to other telephone lines and the like without disconnecting the call which is on hold, is not without its inherent disadvantages. Specifically, it frequently occurs that the hold period, at least for the party on the telephone line who has been placed "on hold" and is waiting, extends for an uncomfortably long duration. In an effort to alleviate this inconvenience to the party who was placed "on hold," many systems and devices have been proposed, some of which contemplate the automatic generation of soothing music on the telephone line during the hold condition so as to entertain the holding party. Other systems serve to automatically measure the time duration of any particular hold interval and serve to generate a reminder signal to the party who initially placed the call on hold. In fact, the key switch lamp on existing multi-line telephones which have placed a call in a "hold condition" is automatically "winked" by the key equipment "line card" currently provided in association with the multi-line telephone by the telephone company, to serve as a reminder of the "hold condition" of an existing call.
Notwithstanding these prior-art and existing attempts to alleviate the inherent annoyance to the party who has been placed "on hold" during an unusually long "hold interval," it remains that the party who was placed on hold, i.e. the passive party, must wait and aurally monitor the telephone line for the return of the party who initially initiated the hold condition, i.e. the active party. Thus, the business of the passive party will be interrupted for virtually the entire length of the telephone hold interval, and the time of the passive party will be thus wasted.